A common application today is the entering, editing and manipulation of text. Application programs that perform such text operation include word processors, text editors, and even spreadsheets and presentation programs. For example, a word processor allows a user to enter text to prepare documents such as letters, reports, memos, etc.
While the keyboard has historically been the standard input device by which text input is performed into these type of application programs, it is currently being augmented and/or replaced by other types of input devices. For example, touch-sensitive pads can be “written” on with a stylus, such that a handwriting recognition program can be used to input the resulting characters into a program. As another example, voice-recognition programs, which work in conjunction with microphones attached to computers, also are becoming more popular. Especially for non-English language users, these non-keyboard type devices are popular for initially inputting text into programs, such that they can then be edited by the same device, or other devices like the keyboard.
A difficulty with the use of such input devices to input text into such programs is that there is no common mechanism by which to manage the text that these devices produce. In particular, a single document may have text entered thereinto by a number of different input devices. For example, parts of the document may have been entered in by the keyboard, other parts of the document via handwriting recognition, and still other parts via speech recognition. The prior art does not provide for, however, text editing correction for such multi-modal environments. For example, once the text has been entered into the document, the prior art does not track which of the input devices was responsible for entry of the text. Thus, when it comes time to correct the text, the prior art usually relies on a default input device, such as the keyboard, by which corrections are to be made, which is an inconvenient solution at best, and does not leverage any source information for the text, such as the graphical data on which handwriting recognition was performed, the voice data on which speech recognition was performed, etc.
For these and other reasons, therefore, there is a need for the present invention.